Customer Reviews

Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This is an excellent product for the home video producer. I have successfully used it to produce a 40 minute high definition video. My video camera is the Sony HDR-HC9 high definition camcorder. This camcorder records in 1440 x 1080, 16:9 aspect ratio. The software detected my camera automatically and captures and writes back to the camera without any problems.

I produced two outputs. One was a high definition video output back to the HDR-HC9 tape camcorder. When played through the HDMI cable connected to my Samsung HDTV, the results were outstanding. I could not see any difference in the quality of the video between the original recorded tape, and the rendered completed production.

My second output for the same video was to a Standard Definition DVD. When I played this DVD on an up-converting 1080p OPPO DVD player, the results were very good on the Samsung HDTV. It would take a sharp eye to tell the difference from the tape version.

I did not produce a blue-ray DVD as I do not have a blue ray DVD player.

The software does not require a supercomputer to run. My computer is a six year old Dell Dimension 8200, 2.0 GHz, 1 Gig memory, with a 120 Gig Hard Drive with 80 gig free memory. The software never crashes. When I produced my DVD movie, it automatically launched the included DVD Architect module without any problems. When capturing and rendering a movie, I made the follwoing adjustments: disable all network connections; shut down anti-virus and anti-spyware programs; disabled my sreen saver. I did this to maximize available memory and to prevent any interuptions to the capturing and rendering process. I did not experience any dropped frames.

The rendering time for producing the tape output movie was about 5 to one. It took 200 minutes to render a 40 minute movie, and another 40 minutes to write it to tape in the videocam. The rendering time for producing the standard definition DVD was quite a bit longer, about 8 hours for the 40 minute movie, plus another 10 minutes to write it out to the DVD. Since this is usually the last step in the movie production process, it is not a problem. I just do the final DVD rendering overnight.

I assume rendering times are reduced if you have a more powerful computer. All editing functions performed without problems and very quickly.

The software can also be opened in two instances which allows you to produce sub-projects and then copy and paste them into a final production.

The learning curve is modest, but if you have used other video editing software, you should be able to get going in a few days. I had previously tried another product offered by Amazon (Corel ULead) but it kept crashing and did not interface correctly with my Sony HD video camera. Fortunately, Amazon gave me a full refund and I switched to Vegas Movie Studio. I would highly recommend it.

My final advice to high definition movie makers: use a tripod.

For those of you who are looking to edit AVCHD video I cannot recommend this software enough. I purchased Vegas 9 to edit video shot on my Canon HG10 AVCHD camcorder after being disappointed with Nero Ultimate (the renderings had interlacing problems in non-still shots). Being new to video editing, I didn't find the interface in Vegas very intuitive at first. However, after watching a few youtube tutorial videos I became quite comfortable in the environment. Also, Vegas 9 has some built-in tutorials for basic editing that I found quite helpful.

Don't just take my word for it, you can TRY it first for 30 days if you download the trial from Sony's website. I have a pretty powerful computer (Quad core, 4G RAM, 9800 GTX) so you might want to test it on your system before purchasing for AVCHD editing.

I used this software for six months. I am COMPELLED to post this review after discovering what many experienced users know - about the major software bug in all versions of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9. I believe even the expensive "pro" version is affected. There IS a complex fix to this bug, but you should evaluate if you are comfortable implementing what many will consider a "complex" and risky fix.

Sony was apparently too lazy to correct the software's inability to access beyond 2GB of your PC's RAM for most versions of Windows. This is the problem. They KNOW of this bug. Fixing this probably requires they re-write huge sections of code.

Since Sony Vegas cannot utilize more than 2 GB of your PC's RAM, then it will crash when rendering requires more. For example, when you directly edit AVCHD (particularly 1080x1920), Sony Vegas will OFTEN CRASH while rendering to most formats (during the Make Movie phase). A typical example: I dropped just five clips onto the video timeline, for a total length only FIVE minutes long. The source video was 1080x1920p 24fps AVCHD. Sony Vegas was ONLY able to successfully render that 5-minute clip into Windows Media 512 Kbps 320x240 video, and sometimes successfully into MainConcept AVC/AAC *mp4 at 640x480 (typical iPhone-suitable format). So LOW res rendering was OK.

Yet, it could NOT render to any higher-res format because it would lock-up and crash part-way through the render, every time. It couldn't even get that five-minute movie rendered out at 720p. It wasn't about THAT video clip; i encoutered this error hundreds of times with various video clips rendering to a wide variety of formats! That is pathetic for a piece of software that claims in every manual and marketing document to support editing native HDV/AVCHD files and exporting to multiple HD formats.

You think my PC is too slow? Guess again. I'm running an i7 920 quad-core CPU clocked to 2.7 GHz, with 12 GB SDRAM DDR3 1600Mhz. That's one of the fastest CPU's you can buy, coupled with tons of RAM; what's more, it has a very fast read/write RAID10 hard drive array, plus a super-fast 160GB Intel X25-M SSD (which I edit my video files from). So my PC is screamin' fast and fully configured; so the bug isn't due to limitations of my PC. I'm running Vista 64-bit, but this bug shows up when installed on multiple other versions of windows! This is all reported in the Sony Vegas software user forums.

I found the software fix on the sonycreativesoftware web site, under the Support > Forums.

NOTE: once I implemented this fix, the problem was INSTANTLY SOLVED: Sony Vegas could immediately render to any format without crashing. Ah, but you need to see how complex the fix is. I'm a Dilbert type; I didn't find the fix complex, but many non-geeks will find this fix too complex.

Go to the forums at site sonycreativesoftware, go to Support > Forums , then bring up the FULL search menu (not the single-field search that is at the top right of the window) Then in the "Search Words:" field you should search for "How to fix render crashes"

Look for posts by "Mad Pierre", or "david_f_knight" or "blink3times"

This fix involves downloading CFF Explorer from ntcore, installing it, then running CFFExplorer as Administrator and MANUALLY re-setting the 2GB limit flag in about FIVE different Sony Vegas run files so they can handle > than 2gig address space.

You should find the detailed instructions in the forums before attempting.

MY ADVICE:

-if you have the money to burn, then just buy something like Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, because you know Adobe worked these kind of major bugs out of its video editing software; Adobe Premiere pro is well known to be stable.
-You could buy Sony Vegas Pro 9, expensive yes but at least a little less expensive than Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, and use a custom encoder like MainConcept which the pro users claim fixes these 2GB stability problems. But you need the Sony Vegas Pro 9 version in order to customize the encoder. I would buy Adobe Premiere before I would buy Sony Vegas Pro.
-If you do NOT have the money for Adobe Premiere Pro and are thinking about Sony Vegas Platinum 9, then I recommend you first assess if you are computer-savvy enough to implement the bug fix detailed in the Sony Vegas forums (see above). Don't forget that manually editing those files has unknown risks.
-You could buy Cineform Neo Scene (or similar) to convert all your source AVCHD files (and other formats!) to avi, then directly edit the avi files in Sony Vegas. On my system (and others report the same) this method also COMPLETELY eliminated the crashes during rendering. Editing avi files also has the benefit eliminating the slowing and frame stutter you see when previewing your timeline movie on a second monitor in "good" or "best" full-screen mode (assuming your PC is fast enough). This is because the avi files are far-less CPU-intensive for Sony Veges to work with. (AVCHD video is highly compressed and CPU-intensive for video editing software to work with). Don't forget to set aside MULTIPLE Terabytes of archive disc space, because of the HUGE file size of the avi versions of your AVCHD files. Yet, all that won't solve all crashes; you'll still crash anytime Sony Vegas needs more than 2GB RAM to render.

THINK ON THIS:

From a software re-write, bug-fix standpoint, it would have been EASY for Sony Vegas to fix this in rev 9 - IF the fix merely involves re-setting the 2GB limit flag on say five installed files. Why didn't they? Maybe there is more to it; we may imagine that probably re-setting that 2GB limit flag on those files creates OTHER instabilities that are even worse. Otherwise, Sony Vegas would have already implemented that simple (to geeks that is) fix. However, I will note that I have not encountered any "side-effect" instabilities from the CFFExplorer fix.

I purchased an Canon HD camera which uses a hard drive to record video and thought it wouldn't be any problem to edit. Wow, was I wrong!! Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 was one of a few programs that could handle editing these files. Still new to the program, but it seems to be well constructed with very helpful dialogue boxes to get you to understand how the program works. I just wish I could condense the files better so I could email them. Still learning more about what the program can do. It was money well spent.

Mainly I'll comment here on editing AVCHD content and producing AVCHD (HD) output, since those issues are still relatively new, not generally well supported, not well documented, and have a lot of misinformation surrounding them. AVCHD is the current standard format that DSLRs and HD camcorders use to capture HD (high definition) video content. I have only used Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 (same video editor as in Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Pro Pack) to make AVCHD videos, so I can't personally compare it to other AVCHD editors, though I have read many other reviews of them and have the strong impression that Vegas is by far the best advanced consumer-grade editor (for both SD (standard definition) and AVCHD).

Vegas has reliably worked for editing my AVCHD/HD content. That is a huge issue, and one that other AVCHD editors may not share. (Some other video editors are notorious for being unreliable. That is, they may frequently crash and even corrupt your project file, destroying all your work.)

AVCHD format video is relatively difficult to decode and requires substantial computational horsepower to do so in real time.

Vegas has reasonable performance editing and rendering AVCHD video on my computer. That is a huge issue, and one that other AVCHD editors may not share. (My computer has an Intel 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo E7400 Processor, 4GB memory, and runs 32-bit Windows XP.) However, in order to edit AVCHD video natively and in real time with my computer, I do have to make certain accommodations. I must choose an appropriate preview size (like exactly quarter or exactly half size) and image quality (like preview rather than good or best), and I may need to buffer the video for it to play smoothly. (Playing a clip once may be a little choppy but also buffers it; play it a second time and it plays smoothly in real time.) If this is unacceptable, a faster computer processor may be adequate, or converting AVCHD to another more easily decoded high definition format may be done. Doing this will reduce the quality, however, unless a lossless conversion is chosen.

Vegas offers many features and capabilities, and allows you to do many useful things, but in exchange for this power and flexibility, the learning curve is fairly steep. Some other consumer-grade editors tend to be easier to learn but offer less user control and place more emphasis on making amateurish-looking effects. However, Vegas does provide a very useful "Show Me" feature to help you learn the basics quickly and painlessly.

A little background for which there is a great deal of confusion and misinformation on the net: AVCHD video can be recorded onto DVD media with a DVD writer, and played back on AVCHD compatible Blu-ray disc players and show true 1920x1080 resolution video on HD televisions. This is fact, though many "experts" on the net have written posts stating that it cannot be done. (Here is one such AVCHD compatible Blu-ray disc player: Panasonic DMP-BD60 Blu-ray Disc Player.) AVCHD video of about 40 minutes in length can be recorded onto regular inexpensive single-layer DVD media.

Vegas has an option for creating AVCHD output files, however the audio in the AVCHD file created is corrupt (as of Vegas version 9.0b) and the file created lacks all the structure and supplemental files required for creating an AVCHD DVD. Vegas also has an option for creating Blu-ray output, and that does work. Furthermore, that output can either be written to a Blu-ray disk, if you have a Blu-ray recorder and Blu-ray media, or it can be written to your computer hard disk and then converted to AVCHD-format and written to a DVD disk with a DVD recorder. However, non-Sony programs are required to convert the Blu-ray format output to AVCHD DVD format.

Here is an overview of how to do so:

1) Create and edit your high-definition video in Vegas, and render it out to your computer hard disk in Blu-ray iso image format (Make Movie/Burn it to a DVD, Blu-ray Disc, or CD/Blu-ray Disc/Render image only + Sony AVC (*.mp4;*.m2ts;*.avc) + Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i, 16 Mbps video stream). (Note: 16Mbps is near the highest bit rate that DVDs support; in particular, they do not support a 24Mbps video stream. If you require a 24Mbps video stream then you must use a Blu-ray writer and Blu-ray media as well as a Blu-ray player. There is nothing wrong or unreasonable with recording your video at 24Mbps for the highest possible quality and then rendering it for 16Mbps output. The results are excellent.)

2) Mount the Blu-ray disk iso image file created in step 1 to a virtual drive on your file system. (You can use the free DAEMON Tools Lite program to mount it. If you use Windows XP you need to install UDF 2.50 file system drivers first, which can be obtained for free. Vista and Windows 7 supposedly support UDF 2.50 natively, but I don't have either and haven't tested them to confirm that.)

3) Use the multiAVCHD program to convert the Blu-ray m2ts video file on the virtual drive that the Blu-ray iso file image was mounted on in step 2. multiAVCHD converts the m2ts file to AVCHD format and writes it and all supporting files in AVCHD DVD structure to your computer hard disk. (multiAVCHD is shareware or something. You can try it out for free. If you like it, you can donate whatever you choose to the author.)

4) Burn the AVCHD DVD structure and files created in step 3 onto a DVD. You can use the free ImgBurn program to do so. You must burn the DVD using the UDF 2.50 file system, which is selectable in ImgBurn.

5) Play your AVCHD DVD on any AVCHD compatible Blu-ray disk player. You get Blu-ray disk quality on DVD media. It's great, but you're limited to about 40 minutes of AVCHD video per single layer DVD.

If your goal is to produce HD video that can be played on computers, then you can edit your AVCHD video source material with Vegas and render it in any of several high definition capable video formats, such as avi or wmv. Files rendered this way are also suitable for uploading high definition video to YouTube, vimeo, exposureroom, dailymotion, etc. (Note: video intended for playback on computers should be rendered in progressive mode rather than interlaced for best quality.)

If your goal is to produce SD video from your AVCHD source material that can be recorded on DVDs and played back on DVD players and SD TVs, then you can do as above but just choose to render your output in an SD resolution rather than an HD resolution.

In other words, Vegas allows you to edit your AVCHD content once, and then render it several times, each in a different resolution and/or format so that you can distribute your production on any type of media for any type of playback hardware, SD or HD. (Of course, the HD versions will have higher quality than the SD versions.) Incidentally, Vegas also allows you to render your output compliant with either the NTSC or PAL standards (not all video editors allow this) so that your production can be played on DVD and TV equipment around the world, not just in the US or Canada or the few other countries that use the NTSC standard.

Basically, Vegas Platinum has many of the features of a professional-grade video editor, but at a consumer-grade video editor price. If you want to produce professional-looking video on a budget, I know of no other choice. By the way, despite all the marketing hype, producing professional-looking video takes a lot of effort and time. Don't be fooled into thinking otherwise. That's one of the reasons that editor reliability is so extremely important... if you've spent days editing your video to make it the best you possibly can, you REALLY won't appreciate your editor crashing and corrupting your project file, destroying all your work. Just ask most any Pinnacle Studio user if you don't appreciate the significance of this. (I owned two different versions of Pinnacle Studio before switching to Vegas. I haven't looked back. I've read of others' similar experiences with other video editors, too.)

Finally, you can download a free trial version of Sony Vegas from Sony's sonycreativesoftware website. It's fully featured, but only works for 30 days. So, you can test it out with your own gear and see if it works for you before laying out any cash. Amazon.com sells it at a better price than Sony, and you can register your trial version with the code you get when you buy it from amazon so you don't even have to reinstall anything if you decide to buy it here after trying it out. You can probably download free trial versions of other video editors from their companies' respective websites, which is strongly recommended if you are leaning towards another video editor. But test them out with videos of substantial length. Any of the editors probably work fine with a 30 second clip. Try something at least 10 minutes long, unless you will never edit anything that long.

P.S. I have read that including high megapixel still photos in Vegas projects does expose a bug that may cause Vegas 9.0b to crash. If this is true (I haven't tested it) and it's an issue for you then until this is fixed, simply reduce the resolution of your photos in any photo editing program before bringing them into your Vegas project. I have used 3 megapixel photos extensively in Vegas projects without any problems. I don't know what resolution triggers this bug.

As a person who is pretty well versed with software and usually picks up on interfaces and software methods quickly I have to say that this is one of the most unintuitive software packages I have ever used. I admit I am not an expert in video editing but I am no stranger to the concept of using time lines, tracks, transitions and effects. What that in mind the methods one needs to use to implement very simple tasks in Vegas is just absurd.

After using this software for several days and putting a solid 8 to 10 hours of time into trying to create a very simple 3 minute video that should take 30 minutes max to create, I have simply given up on this software. I was able to create my video, but the time and pain I endured in the process was just not worth it. This same 3 minute video took me about 15 minutes to create in Adobe Premier the very first time I used the program. Premier was very easy to figure out even with no use of the help system, but Vegas was very difficult to use even with frequent reference to the help system.

I also had significant issues with crashes when rendering video with Vegas. This occurred regardless of the output format (.avi, .mpeg4 etc). This crash was not due to using overburdened hardware or memory as I am running XP Pro on a E8200 Core 2 Duo CPU with 3 gigs of RAM.

It may be that this software has tons of features and may do a lot for the price, but unless you are prepared for a very painful and long learning curve I would look elsewhere.

I work as a professional video producer as my full time job. I use Avid Media Composer at work, but Avid does not offer anything inexpensive to use at home, so I did some research, read reviews, and bought Sony Movie Studio Pro. It is great. I love this software. Sony's work-flow is not yet intuitive to me (I've been using Avid for a decade and I find the audio especially different) but I must say that the features in this software are amazing for the price. You can do almost the same things with this software that you'd expect in pro-level applications. For example, I just made a video with some shots where one element (a red shirt for example) is in color, while everything else is in black and white. In another shot, I used the light-ray effect to create an awesome sports running shot.
To summarize, I'm blown away with the features this product offers. For the price, I can't imagine a better product. Some inexpensive software is designed for amateurs and are very dumbed-down. This product is for folks who want to make high quality videos - who aren't afraid to read a manual. But the learning curve is worth it. Great product. Highly recommended.

I am in AVCHD nirvana. After walking through the shadow of AVCHD death, I have finally arrived. And what a journey it has been! After several programs, PCs, MACs, and months of dead ends, it has been a pleasure to work with a program that does not crash or produce substandard results.

I bought a fairly high end PC for the very purpose of editing 1080 AVCHD movies from our Canon HF-10: Dell Studio XPS 435T, i7 cpu, 12gb ram, 64 bit Vista, 1TB hard drive, ATI Radeon HD 4800 w/1gb ram, blu-ray writable etc. My early experiences were nothing short of disaster. Hard as I tried, I could not get Adobe Premier Elements to do ANYTHING reliably. The program literally failed to work during every phase of development. Simply scrolling the file using the horizontal scroll bar caused the program to terminate. The loss of whole projects that became corrupt and failed to load became the last straw. (Read my Amazon review of Premier Elements).

We bought a Mac but that only traded one set of problems for another. Macs will work (reluctantly) with AVCHD files but the straw the broke this camel's back was that while both iMovie and Final Cut Express (yes, I bought that too in a vain attempt at video success) will convert AVCHD files, they will NOT work with files that have been previously offloaded from the camera (caveats here too, but our situation still prevented their use). So we bought Toast 10 and THAT was supposed to save us...until the audio de-synced about two seconds rendering the output unusable. We ventured into video conversion products that left our pristine 1080 movies looking jaggedy and blurry. Then on to de-interlace programs ad nauseum. By this time I was totally frustrated and dejected over our inability to do anything with our Canon movies. Our Mac is one beautiful machine but even IT could not save us.

My first experience with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 was also a dismal failure (frequent lockups and program shut downs)...until I discovered a gem of recommendation on an online forum that changed everything. By changing the memory flags of key m2ts program DLLs to allow them to use more than 2gb of memory, all the lockups went away. Imagine my delight when I produced three back-to-back blu-ray discs without a single lockup or failure OF ANY SORT... its like using a program THAT WORKS... how refreshing! Using a program called CFF Explorer, I changed the settings on these files: vegas80.exe, m2tsplug.dll, mcstdh264dec.dll, and sonymvd2pro_xp.dll (please Google it to verify and get all the instructions) and configured Sony Vegas to use the full 1920x1080 etc and it worked!

I could quibble over the interface and the idiosyncracies of Sony Vegas Movie Studio, but I'm not going to. The whole video editing experience has been so bad that frankly, I'm just glad the thing works. Now we have crystal clear, jagged edge-free, perfectly synced audio movies that were the whole reason for buying the Canon HF-10. Thanks Sony for producing a quality product.

If you haven't used Sony software before, make sure you utilize the excellent tutorials built into the program. It can be very intimidating if you don't. At first, I was dissatisfied with the product because I did not understand it. DO NOT GIVE UP. You can do so many COOL things with this software and the finished product looks professional. Great value for the money. If you have a HDV camcorder (like the Canon Vixia), you absolutely need this to import HVD quality video. Don't go cheap on this! Get the Platinum!

I am just a guy who has probably 200 hours of video on 8mm tape, mini DV tape, and now, mini HDV tape. All I've ever wanted in life is a video editor that wouldn't crash, burn, corrupt, and actually do what it's supposed to do. And never, ever, add a bunch of garbage utilites and programs to my computer that I don't need (yes, I'm talking to you, Pinnacle).

Score! Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum actually does what it's supposed to do - and my computer hasn't crashed, either!

I'm a graduate student, and I just finished making a 12-minute video using this product. I'm pretty pleased that although I have had NO training on using video editing software, this software package is intuitive enough that whenever I wonder what to do, often times I'll guess, and lo-and-behold, it works. I've accessed the Help file a few times, but mostly it's just been trial-and-error, and most of the trials have worked as I'd expect them to work. Whatever is frustrating to me now, I assume it's because I really have no idea how to do video editing.

I like that it lets me use 4 audio tracks, but I do wish it would let me use more. It's easy to find that you need more than just 4 audio tracks when you're doing a video with background music, narration, sound effects, more. Note: this product came with Sound Forge audio editor, and Sound Forge only lets you work with a single audio track -- it's not a mixer.

Having separate tracks for video worked well, too. I was able to add text labels as needed. The labels had some handy, easy-to-set features like shadowing and color fill, all of which were customizable. The one thing I thought this lacked was an ability to use text animation. Maybe it can do that, but if so, it's not apparent to me. So, the image text is static on the video.

I *loved* the way you could easily fade in/out anything -- audio, video, text. Very intuitive (drag the upper corners of the storyboard segment you're working with). I liked, too, how easy it was to increase or decrease the volume of an audio track. SoundForge was great for adding some light reverb so it my narration is more full-sounding (though on my video, I still added too much reverb). So many settings from which to choose, if you knew what you were doing, you could make a killer video!

I also liked that when I made a change to, say, and audio track, the program would open the audio track for editing as a "Take 2" version automatically. I didn't have to mess with saving to a separate filename. It also took my "Take 2" version and just inserted into my project without me having to do that.

This thing generates music! I used several program-generated music tracks in my video. When I needed to resize the music background to make it longer or shorter, it was easy to regenerate the music once more. The music it generates is terrific, and there are a ton of choices (although I thought a ton more would have been nice to have, as I still had to go outside this product to find a music track that was "just right" for my project).

All of these features would be meaningless if the program wasn't stable. But it is. Never had it crash yet. With Pinnacle, I was encountering problems within the first hour I tried using it.

This program also works with High-Def video. In fact, you control HDV cameras directly from within the tool (if you're using just mini DV, you have to use a separate utility to handle the import). To import from my Canon HDV camcorder, it was as simple as plugging in FireWire and clicking File, Import Media. Simple!

I'm actually not a fan of Sony products -- they're overpriced for the quality you think you're getting -- but Sony did right by putting Vegas together. I think it's the best video editor for a Windows-based computer.